Life on the Road - Residency Visa and Income Requirements(By T.W. Anderson)

For
the vast majority of road warriors who are interested primarily in simply
traveling the world and visiting different countries, a passport stay is
generally sufficient. That is, most countries around the world permit you to
enter their country and stay without applying for a visa.

A
caveat for this is that you are always on limited time. If you happen to hail
from Western country, this can range anywhere from a single month all the way
up to six months, although the average is around 90 days. If you happen to come
from non-Western country, it largely depends on the relations your country has
with the rest of the world.

Unfortunately,
religious and political issues that relate to your government and have
absolutely no bearing on who you are as an individual can nevertheless impede
your travels to some degree. But what about those of you who want to take your
life on the road and actually pursue the immersion travel route?

Immersion travel is also known as slow travel, and to put it simply it is basically living in another country on a long-term basis. Rather than skim reading the destination, you actually take the time to read from the front cover to the back cover; every paragraph, every sentence, and every word on every page. But in order to stay in a country beyond the initial 90 days or six months or one month, you have to meet residency visa and income requirements, for permission to stay for a long-term duration.

The
only way to obtain a residency visa, apart from investing hundreds of thousands
of dollars in the local economy or being a celebrity or government official, is
to apply for one at the consulate that governs the country you are looking to
live in. Bear in mind that student visas can also give you residency, but for
the sake of people who want to professionally travel we are generally talking
about freelance visas as well as pensioner visas.

At
their very basic level, there is no discernible difference between a freelance
visa and a pensioner visa since they both require around the same amount of money
to acquire. As a general rule this is between $2,000 and $3,000 per month of
income coming into your bank account. Different countries have different
requirements, however, and it is your responsibility to check with the relevant
consulate and embassy to determine what visa and income requirements you will actually need.

In most cases you will have
to provide at least 12 months’ worth of statements proving that you have a
dedicated income source. This can be a brokerage account, a bank account, or
even PayPal statements. I’ve even used receipts from hotels who have comped us
hospitality in exchange for publicity, and used the average price of the room
we were given multiplied against the number of days we stayed, along with any
food that was included, as proof of income.

Every
country has different requirements. Some governments dictate that pensioners
have to have a minimum bank account balance over the course of an entire year,
rather than a monthly income coming in, and they need to be able to show that
their pension is from an official source; that is, the same source over many
months of time, along with the proof of employment that goes along with the
pension to show that it is real.

Freelancers
often have an easier time of applying for visas, because all you have to do is
prove that you have financial stability and bring in enough income according to
the requirements of that particular government. As previously mentioned, you
can use a wide variety of income sources to provide proof; all they want to
know is that you can provide for yourself financially and won’t to be a burden
on the country while you are living there.

I
will admit this, however; not every country will simply accept your proof of
income on the first go. Sometimes they will want to have an interview with you
to go over the various income sources so that you can explain them to staff that
may or may not understand what it means to bring in income from the Internet.
Bear in mind that there are still quite a few countries which are still
developing in terms of technology and while those of us who hail from Western
nations are intimately familiar with PayPal and digital transactions, they are
not commonplace in every single country around the world.

Providing
proof of income for a residency visa is all about one thing: paperwork and an
actual paper trail (or digital trail) that shows proof of income from actual
sources. There are some ways around this (which I talk about in The Expat
Guidebook) that require some outside the box thinking, but as a general rule if
you plan on living in a different country as opposed to simply visiting, you
are going to have to get over your aversion to sharing personal information,
because governments will not accept word-of-mouth. They want actual proof of
income before giving you permission to stay in the country.

While
you can also do visa runs (hopping across various borders once your passport
stay is up and then coming back to get another passport stay) in some
countries, obtaining a residency visa carries along with it a number of other
benefits apart from simply being able to stay in the country for a longer
period of time. Not the least of which is the ability to open up a foreign bank
account, as well as have the opportunity to stay around long enough to build
working relationships and obtain the local consulting and freelancing gigs that
we talked about in episode seven.

That’s
it for this week. If you have any questions, ask them in the comments below,
and stay tuned for next week’s episode where will be talking about some of the
downsides of long-term travel and how you can avoid them.

T.W. Anderson has been traveling the world full-time since January of 2008. He is the author of both the books displayed above, the two flagship products which detail how to build a blog, brand and income and travel the world without a budget.